Monday, 11 April 2011

"Dudes! I could be wrong, but I think that to have a "gay caveman", you need a skeleton that is both gay and a caveman. And this ain't either!"...Absolutely bad science reporting. Bad, bad, bad. Miserably awful. No links, no indication of affiliation of sources, no background information. No photo (the Daily Mail, of all places, came up with a photo of the burial, while the Telegraph illustrates their web story with generic stock photo of African rock art). No indication of whether the work is pre-publication or whether there's a forthcoming paper. Yuck."

John Hawks, paleanthropolgist and associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, on his weblog, pulls apart last week's 'Gay Caveman' stories.Hawks also says he isn't certain the skeleton is male. For more on the difficulty of knowing the skeleton's sex and sexuality, see Bone Girl, the blog of biological anthroplogist, Kristina Kilgrove; "What I've learned in the past few months about these two publications [The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph] specifically is that the important, scientific details are at the very end of the article. So I read the articles backwards to let the evidence sink in before I read the crazy conclusions the journalist reaches." ["If you read the story to the last paragraph - and that's always a good idea; that's where the interesting news usually is when you read a news story..." Noam Chomsky - Interviewed by Amy Goodman, 2008]Also see; 'Gay Caveman: Wrecking A Perfectly Good Story' by Rosemary Joyce, professor of anthropology at UC Berkley.This is the source report - from Press TV - which was "completely taken out of context" by the Telegraph, Mail etc etc.Don't say I didn't try and warn ya...